There is much research on social support indicating that those around us can be very effective in helping us to overcome periods of distress. While this research provides little clue as to specifically how it is others accomplish this beneficial effect, theorists have proposed that social support is generally helpful because it serves certain ameliorative functions for us. Two functions which are presumed to be particularly important in stress management are the provision of emotional support, or letting the distressed person known that he or she is liked and appreciated, and informational support, or performance appraisals. But, theory and research in social psychology, and some related clinical work, indicates that several specific problems are likely to arise in people's attempts to meet the informational and emotional functions of support. These problems are, basically, that others may not provide much in the way of emotionally or informationally supportive communications, and even if they do, the distressed person may not interpret those communications as very supportive. While previous work suggests these problems will occur, it is limited in two ways. First of all, the vast bulk of this work has only investigated interactions between strangers and distressed others, even though friends, family members and other intimates are obviously more important sources of support. Secondly, this past work has not clarified the theoretical processes underlying some of these problems. We propose a series of twelve studies to investigate the extent to which these problems in providing social support occur between distressed college students and their friends, and to try to distinquish more clearly than past work has among potential underlying processes.